Thoughts On the Decline and Fall of Kanye West
I think we owe it to those around us to be(come) our best selves.
Author’s note: I’m sorry for sending this out on Monday as opposed to last week. I normally aim for a weekend publication schedule, but my wife’s birthday was on Sunday so we spent most of the weekend celebrating.
I watched In Whose Name? this week, the new documentary about the decline and fall of Kanye West. I found the whole drama to be incredibly sad.
I think one reason is that I used to quite like Kanye. I discovered West in my 20s, and I was immediately drawn to his ridiculous, over-the-top braggadocio. At the time I was pretty scared of almost everything, and there’s something about bumping “Stronger” or “No Church In the Wild” that makes it hard to feel too frightened. If my terror and intense sense of shame was one end of a spectrum, then lines like “You should be honored by my lateness / that I’d even show up to this fake shit” are on the opposite end of that spectrum. And somehow listening to Kanye pulled me towards a healthier middle.
The other reason I really liked Kanye was that I saw in him a deep and thoughtful artist. He was accused of being a narcissist, but after listening to “Runaway” I disagreed; how many narcissists will put their own worst sins on blast to an audience of millions? I loved “Power” because it was ridiculously over-the-top (”Screams from the haters got a nice ring to it / I guess every superhero needs his theme music”) but it was also a thoughtful look at the dangers of power to Kanye’s soul and artistry.
I never felt like I knew Kanye. But he helped me. And I looked up to him; if not as a person, then certainly as an artist.
Watching his fall from grace was therefore very sad.
In Whose Name? is cut from 3,000 hours of footage (director Nico Ballesteros was invited to shadow Kanye from 2018-2024), most of it intensely private, and it documents the unraveling of Kanye’s life.
His mental health spirals. You see him lash out and start yelling at close friends and allies over trivial offenses. In one scene, you see Kim confront him during one of these tantrums. He says that acting out is part of his personality. Through tears, she rejoins that these episodes used to be few and far between, rather than happening every single day.
You see Kim divorce him and take the kids. It’s difficult to blame her.
You see his mental state deteriorating precipitously. He rants to Kim about how he’s a modern-day slave. He says that anytime someone tells him what to do, it’s as if they reached in and physically manipulated his brain. He shows up to one interview wearing all silver reflective gear, looking like some monstrous blob with only his eyes showing. The interviewer mentions that Forbes puts Kanye’s net worth at $2 billion. But Kanye doesn’t like Forbes, and even after the interviewer tries to make amends, Kanye storms out of the interview in a huff. Kanye was always a rough personality, but it’s hard to watch scenes like these and conclude that he didn’t used to be better.
And then of course there’s his antisemitism. The documentary is pure uncut footage from Ballesteros shadowing Kanye (now Ye), and there’s no voiceover or attempt to make sense of his sudden turn. I’m not sure what kind of sense could be made; I don’t think racial prejudice is something that most people arrive at rationally. I was close to someone who held antisemitic and white supremacist views for years, and suffice to say that they did not come by their views through any kind of traditional logic. I think Ye’s mental illness—-perhaps exacerbated by his belief that he’s always right and by his intense unwillingness, at least in the past few years, to suffer criticism—had more to do with it than anything. But in any case: he went “Defcon 3” on the Jewish people, for reasons which probably only he knows, and the remainder of his life melted down. He lost sponsorships and deals. He was banned from Instagram and X. He went from internationally respected to internationally loathed.
By the end of the documentary, he still has plenty of money. But in every way that counts, he—and his life—are a shell of what they once were.
So what can we learn from this story?
For me, the key lesson is that hurting people hurt people.
Throughout the documentary, we see Kanye do immense harm to those around him.
This is true on the micro scale. He hurts Kim enough that she leaves him and won’t let him see his kids anymore. He lashes out at everyone around him.
It’s also true on the macro scale. His comments about Jews hurt millions of people. I have Jewish friends who once admired Kanye, and who now feel betrayed by him. I get why.
But watching his life, it’s hard to see him as a mustache-twirling villain. He didn’t set out to hurt anybody (in fact, he actually started a church with the goal of ushering in world peace). But his untreated mental illness seems to have done a number on his ability to make good decisions. Or to put it another way: I think all of the pain he caused others was simply his own inner pain boiling out into the world.
I wonder what would change if we saw more people through this lens? What if, when we saw someone saying or doing something terrible, our first response was not “Wow, what an awful human being” but rather, “Wow, that person must be in a lot of pain?”
This doesn’t mean that we can’t impose consequences on people who say and do terrible things. I’m glad Kanye lost his deals and his endorsements and his platform after his antisemitic comments. It’s probably good for both Kim and his kids that she left him.
But what if we paired these consequences with a recognition of the profound pain that the other person must be battling? How might that change how we saw them? Could it make us less judgmental, and more willing to minister to the people in society who most need our love?
We are our sibling’s keeper, after all. What if we acted more like it?
But there’s another side to this too. Early in the documentary, Kanye says that mental illness is just like physical illness, except that the injury is to your brain. That’s a useful lens if we want to destigmatize mental illness, which we should. But it’s also incomplete. If I broke my leg tomorrow, the only person who would really suffer is me. Sure, there would be ripple effects (my wife would have to take more time to help me around the house), but those ripple effects would be pretty small.
Mental illness isn’t like that. Untreated mental illness can cause profound anguish in the mentally ill person, but it can also boil out and cause pain to those around them. The person who abused me did it because she suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder. When I burned through a slew of friends in my 20s, it was because I was deeply depressed and codependent.
This past winter, I went through a period of such intense depression that I actually considered divorcing my amazing wife because I couldn’t see how life with me could do anything other than hold her back. Had I given into my depression instead of seeking help, I would have hurt a lot more people than just myself.
I think the other piece of being our sibling’s keeper is that we owe it to those around us to work on ourselves. I don’t mean to imply that every mental illness is treatable to the same degree, or that we can never have hard times and bad days. But we owe it to the people we love to work every day to be the highest and best versions of ourselves. As Kanye shows us, when we let the devil on our shoulder run the show, we can do a lot of damage.
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